The photo of the 1970 Hugo Award you have posted here: http://www.thehugoawards.org/?page_id=104 is not the actual award that was presented in Germany in 1970. Kelly Freas was unhappy with the appearance of the base on the trophy he received and had a new one specially made to replace it. Kelly’s 1970 trophy, the one you have shown in the photo, is therefore unique. For more background on this, I refer you to Mike Glyer’s article in Mimosa #14: http://www.jophan.org/mimosa/m14/glyer.htm

I have been told that my novel, “Solfleet: The Timeshift Saga, The Call of Duty, Book One of the Excalibur Trilogy”, published in April 2007, has been nominated for a 2008 Hugo Award. Is there/Will there be a list of nominees available to the public, or can you “officially” confirm the nomination for me?

The nominating period for the 2008 Hugo Awards has not yet ended. It ends at the end of February. At that time, the Hugo Award administrator will contact the authors of the works that receive sufficient nominating votes to make the final ballot and will ask them if they want to accept nomination. If you aren’t contacted, that means you weren’t nominated.

Now, what I think you may have heard is that at least one of the thousands of people eligible to cast nominating ballots for the 2008 Hugo Awards has nominated your work for the Best Novel Hugo Award. That’s not the same thing as being “nominated for a Hugo Award.” Only those works placing in the top five after the nominating period ends are “Hugo Award nominees” and will appear on the ballot.

The Hugo Award Administrator will publish a list of those works receiving a certain minimum number of votes after the final Hugo Award results are announced at this year’s Worldcon in Denver in August.

WSFS does not publish works ourselves. In past years, many Hugo Award nominees have been made available for reading or viewing for free or cheaply over the web; however, it is up to the individual publishers to decide how to make their works available to the public.

FYI, something I just realized (and I’ll also send a note to the Hugo administrator), Steven Moffat is listed as Stephen Moffat here and on the Denvention 3 web site. I’m surprised no one has pointed that out. If he gets his third Hugo for Blink, it would probably be good if his name was spelled correctly on the award….

I note that the site needs some minor updates:
* Denvention is still listed as an upcoming Worldcon
* Aussiecon is not so listed
* The photo on the front page of the Denvention (2008) Hugo links to the photo page for the 2007 Hugo

Also, I’d like to suggest you add a written description of each year’s Hugo award on its photo page. This would be good for the visually impaired, but also would be interesting to other people. The description could be done from a photo, but it would probably be better done by someone who has seen/handled the award in question; or even better, by the designer or Hugo administrator where possible. I’d suggest the description include a discussion of the design itself, materials used, colors of the various bits and pieces, and symbolism (if any) of the design elements. For instance, presumably the “backdrop” behind the rockets on the Denvention 3 Hugo symbolize the mountains around Denver, but the designer could speak best to that.

It took us a few days, but we have updated the things you noted, and a few other pages as well, such as the information on nominating for next year.

Adding written descriptions is an interesting idea, and we might be able to do this for future awards and for relatively recent ones if the designers are willing to do the write-ups. Doing it for all of the awards would be a bit challenging just based on the amount of time involved. We only recently managed to get photographs of all of the trophies — some years’ trophies proved to be quite elusive. (Not every year’s trophy is represented in the traveling Worldcon exhibit. The policy of creating an extra trophy for permanent exhibit is relatively recent, particularly because for early Worldcons, the cost of building the trophies was a much larger proportion of the total convention budget than it is today.)

It’s slightly aggravating that one can’t find anywhere on the site an answer to the simple question as to whether there was a “special category” for graphic story for the current round of Hugo voting. I realize you want to be general in the info you offer, but being current is also nice. Anticipation has pulled all the info off their Hugo page since nominations are closed.

I was going to point people to your site for info, but it doesn’t have it!

It’s not particularly well noted on the Anticipation web site, but information about their decision to offer a Graphic Story category as a Special Category is detailed in a press release issued last August.

Your point about it not being well-documented here either is well taken, although, as you note, we’re in the position of trying to stay general to the Hugo Awards as a whole rather than any particular year’s categories (except on the year-by-year listings, of course). We’ve added a note to the Additional Category section of the Hugo Award Categories page. This is a temporary note only for the duration of the current “Worldcon year,” and we’ll take it down after this year’s Worldcon. Should the WSFS Business Meeting ratify the pending constitutional amendment on the subject, we will of course update that page to include the new Graphic Story category.

Thanks for the fast response. There’s value in being general, and I love the historical information, but unless you want to restrict your readership to people interested in the history, it’s nice to have the basics for the current year up as well, maybe in a very prominent front-page link. This is an obvious site to point people to for that sort of information.

Especially since this information isn’t easily available anywhere else I know of, it would seem to make sense to have a permanent section of the Hugo Award Categories page (or perhaps a separate page) which lists not only all uses of the Additional Category rule but the ranges of years for which each of the standard categories has existed.

I was wondering if you could post the final voting deadline for Hugos for this year’s Worldcon (Montreal). I do not see the deadline on Montreal’s convention site, nor on this site when I click on the “voting deadlines” tag. I assume that date has already been set? Sorry if I’ve missed something obvious.

Anticipation has not yet released the 2009 Hugo Awards Final Ballot, and therefore has not set the final voting deadline. While we were in Montreal last weekend, we were reassured that the ballot would be included in the mailing of Progress Report 4, expected to mail sometime in mid-May. When that happens, they expect to post the ballot on their web site. It may appear only as a PDF first, with an online voting version also planned for later.

Sorry for the generic salutation, but I didn’t know to whom I should address this correspondence. I would like to lodge a formal complaint about the issuing of a semipro Hugo. I’ve read the requirements for qualifying for the award and they are as generic as my greeting.

It would seem to me that these, so called, semipro zines, are nothing more than a literary Ponzi scheme; whereby the magazines solicit stories from their readership, ask for money (donations) and then publish what they deem as the best story. They take the proceeds and publish a print magazine, which they sell to their readership and to the public, keeping the profits. We should all own a magazine that pays the artist a miserly .03 cents a word, and take their labors and profit from it!

A careful reading of any of these zines will show a multitude of grammatical and punctuation errors because the owners/editors haven’t a clue as to what the editing process is about. It’s not semipro, it’s semi-amateurish and brings the level of discourse about legitimate SF literature down.

I can site you chapter and verse, taken from various zines, including your last two Hugo semipro winners. The mistakes are fundamental to good grammar and have increased exponentially over the past months. Perhaps it is best to cite at least one example:

“Not people, for all that most of them had adopted the forms of people in homage.”

It is a non sequitur. The same story had four misspelled words. I’m not going to give the name of the story or the name of the zine; after all, I’m not trying to embarrass, but to point out a growing problem. But this is the type of grammar being published with your implicit blessing.

If the Hugo’s are giving awards for this type of poorly written and poorly edited semipro magazines, the mind only reels at what might be found a SF novel sanctioned by the Hugo committee. It would seem that if your organization is rewarding these kinds of poorly edited zines that it is also your organization’s responsibility to clean things up. It doesn’t take much effort because the trespasses are everywhere. All you need do is double click any browser with a link to a semipro zine.

Happy New Year!

I hope you will work to correct these zines, or disassociate yourselves from these ‘rackets’ that call themselves literature.

The rules for Best Semiprozine, like all of the other categories, are in the WSFS Constitution. Any member of the current Worldcon can propose changes to the rules, including the elimination of a category, by submitting that change to the WSFS Business Meeting. (See Changing the Rules for details.) Every attending member of the current Worldcon can attend the Business Meeting and vote on all of the proposals. If you think there should not be a Best Semiprozine category, you should attend the next Worldcon, submit a proposal to the Business Meeting to remove the category, and attempt to convince the attendees to vote for your proposal. There is no Board of Directors or “Hugo Committee” that decides what the categories should be. The members of WSFS decide what the categories should be.

The members of WSFS also decide what publications they consider worthy of nomination or selection for a Hugo Award, since nominations and voting are open to all of the members. (See I Want to Vote for more details. There is no “Hugo Committee” who decides the relative worth of nominees. The Hugo Administration Subcommittee (selected by each individual Worldcon, not by those of us running the Hugo Awards Web Site) handles the mechanical administration of the Awards, issuing ballots, counting nominations, determining technical eligibility, and so forth. The Committee does not make value judgments about the “worth” of a nominee. That’s up to the individual members of the Worldcon to do when they cast their ballots.

I hope this clarifies how the Hugo Awards work and how you can make changes if you perceive that something needs to be corrected.

I publish a print magazine, and do my best, and pay $0.05/word. There is no “profit from it” step. I will repeat: There is no “profit from it” step. You are welcome to put the many hundreds of hours and the thousands of dollars into a magazine to qualify it as eligible for the semiprozine award. You are quite welcome, indeed. And if you can come close to breaking even, let alone “profit from it”, I shall hail you as a genius.

Also, you spelled “cite” incorrectly. (And I’m sure my own post has its own errors, but I am not here throwing stones.)

I have a question about the distinctions between fanzine and semiprozine, the main point hinging on the word “press” in the line:

had an average press run of at least one thousand (1000) copies per issue

Does “press” mean physical copies (not just the colloquial “printing press” but digital printing, etc. of course) or does it also apply to “or the equivalent in other media” type of wording, which would mean to include digital file downloads? For example a “print run” of about 500 per issue, combined with 500 PDF downloads, making the total “physical plus virtual” run creep, just, above 1000.

The question you raise has thus far been left to the discretion of the individual Hugo Award Administrators, and there is, as far as I’m aware, insufficient precedent to give you an unequivocal answer. I suspect that if you ask the current Administrator a hypothetical question, you’ll be told, “We won’t rule on hypothetical questions; we only make a ruling when we’re forced to do so by nominee that would have enough nominations to make the final ballot.”

Hi, I believe there is an error in your page explaining voting system for the 2nd to 5th place. You say: The method used by Hugo Administrators to determine 2nd through 5th place is to remove all of the votes that placed the winner first, and then repeat the counting process from the start. The winner of that second count will get second place.
If this is the case, then for example in this year’s (2011) best novel, in order to get your 2nd winner, you have to remove all “first” votes of Blackout/All Clear, right? Still, the same number of votes as before placed Feed first, and that should be 416 and not 476.
What I don’t get right?
Thanks in advance!

In the example you give, we don’t eliminate the entire ballot of those people who placed Blackout/All Clear first; we just count their ballots as if that preference wasn’t there. So in this case, sixty voters who voted Blackout/All Clear as their first choice placed Feed as their second, so when we start the count for second place, we look at those ballots and say, “Their first choice isn’t on the ballot anymore — it placed first — so transfer their votes to Feed.”

Thanks for putting up the list of 2012 nominees. There’s a bit of a hitch, though. I tried to highlight and right-click the name of one of the nominees, to do a search, and there seems to have some sort of problem with that. I’d like to learn more about some of the less familiar nominees, but I’d rather not have to retype all the names! [Can you email me at crockett@eol.ca and let me know when it’s fixed, please?]

I think you’re probably being led sightly astray by our site theme, which makes it a little difficult to tell sometimes if you’ve actually highlighted something. We’re not locking the posts or trying to prevent people from selecting the text, but the highlight color is almost exactly the same as the normal on this theme.

The Hugo Award no longer can be taken as a serious forum for the best science fiction of our era. Selections have become mundane, immature, and near unreadable. Among Others (2012) lacks serious credibility (as have many winners over the past decade) is boring, and frankly a disappointment. You do not seem to realize that your credibility is shrinking year by year, to the point where winning the Hugo is a non-event.

Eligability says in one part “Note that series as a whole are not eligible. For instance, an episode in a TV show may be eligible, but the TV show itself is not. Sequences of comics that form a story arc or volume may be eligible, but the comic series itself is not.”

Given Game of Thrones winning Dramatic Long Form, this might do to be clarified.

NickPheas: What you read in eligibility is our restatement of the actual technical language in section 3.2.6 of the WSFS Constitution:

3.2.6: Works appearing in a series are eligible as individual works, but the series as a whole is not eligible. However, a work appearing in a number of parts shall be eligible for the year of the final part.

In this case, the voters as a whole decided that Game of Thrones was actually a long multi-part story, not individual stand-alone episodes like episodes of Doctor Who, and the Hugo administrator agreed, similar to when Heroes Season 1 was nominated as a single long serialized story.

What you have to bear in mind is that there is not necessarily a bright-line distinction between when a television show consists of independent stories and when it is actually a long single story cut into pieces for convenience in broadcasting. The distinction has to be made both by the voters, who decide where they think a work best fits, and the Administrator, who decides whether the work is legally nominated in the category.

I am an astrologer. I suppose for this group I should make that a confession – perhaps I might belong to AA for that… but in any case it will explain why I am interested in the actual date (and perhaps time) of the 1970 Hugo award, at the Heidelberg conference, to Ursula Le Guin, for The Left Hand of Darkness.

This is arguably one of the most original novels, and created worlds, ever – and I am quite interested in Ms. Le Guin’s life and work. The transit chart for this date is very interesting, in connection to Ms. Le Guin’s natal or birth chart, especially if the ceremony was held on the final day, August 24th, 1970, a Monday.

We’ve been helped out here by Colin Harris, who has a copy of the 1970 Worldcon Program Book, which, as he says, “It lists Hugo Award Banquet at Heidelberg Castle on Sunday evening (Aug 23) at 7.30 p.m, under Toastmaster John Brunner.”

The banquet would have been followed by the awards ceremony itself, so it would have been sometime that evening.

Thanks so much for this information – which has helped me greatly as I am getting ready to publish the date of this award as part of my study of Ursula Le Guin’s chart regarding the placement of her Eris (new planet past Pluto, named in 2006, as traditional from the Roman and Greek pantheon of gods and goddesses). She was the Goddess of Chaos and Discord – and has a higher purpose in Western Astrology as I am attempting to demonstrate in my forthcoming book, perhaps to be called The Tenth Planet 🙂

I’m thinking of nominating “Jodorowsky’s Dune” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodorowsky's_Dune), a documentary, to Best Related Work. But it was released in 2013 at Cannes, and got a wide release in 2014. Would it not be eligible for 2015?

Nana: Assuming that the wide release in 2014 included the USA, then yes, it would be eligible in 2015. That is not because of the limited distribution in 2013, but because of the general rule adopted this past year as section 3.2.4 of the WSFS Constitution:

Works originally published outside the United States of America and first published in the United States of America in the previous calendar shall also be eligible for Hugo Awards.

It’s basically a spreadsheet open for anybody to edit that has potential nominations for every category. I don’t know who made it, but it’s surprisingly helpful. There’s a few potential nominees that’ll make you cringe, but just as many you might find interesting.

I have a question about some winners. They appear on your history, but not in your award category list. For example, the award for best professonal artist. In the list of past winners, there’s no winner work next to the name of the winners.
Are those awards given to artists based on something else than the work of the previous year, like a lifetime award or something?

The two artist awards (Best Professional Artist and Best Fan Artist) are for the body of work that artist did during the previous calendar year, not for lifetime achievement or for any specific work. There was a period of five years during which there was also a category for Best Original Artwork, which was for a specific piece of artwork, but that category was discontinued.

The categories presented for the Hugo Award have changed from year to year. The current list of categories is not what categories existed in the past. To see what categories existed in a given year, you need to look at the history list.